Heritage in the face of rising waters: memory, identity and the future of displaced cultural landscapes

A seminar on "heritage displacement" presented by Lucie K. Morisset and Anne-Solange Muis

Friday, September 22, 2023, Théâtre Sainte-Catherine, 264, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Montréal

The impact of rising water on built heritage is not new. But while the acqua alta of Venice remains probably the most famous example of this phenomenon, its generalization and, in general, the problems caused by climate change have opened up a new field of study and practice in heritage preservation. UNESCO's strategy for a "resilient world heritage" bears witness to this reorientation of heritage expertise, which nevertheless remains very attached to the material dimensions of heritage, taken as a sort of museum object in deleterious museum conditions. Other strategies and other situations, perhaps less visible on the world scene, offer alternatives to this approach that invite us to rethink and question heritage in the contemporary world: this is the case in Miquelon-Langlade (a commune of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, a French overseas territory), the starting point of this seminar, as well as in the Îles-de-la-Madeleine (Quebec). 

While the focus is on the great monuments whose deterioration we hope to slow down or stop, often by technical means of resistance or risk management, there is still little discussion of the local memorial and identity issues of rising waters. On a global or national scale, the traditional vision of heritage and its preservation often neglects ancient living environments and cultural landscapes which, without necessarily being centuries old or monumental, are no less bearers of history, specificity and belonging which qualify them perfectly as heritage and which are also endangered by the waters. They are also less talked about in the heritage arcanes because the survival of these inhabited environments calls for a solution little appreciated by experts and charters: the relocation of an entire village beyond the line of flood zones or, as in the case of Kiruna (Sweden), outside the zone of collapse of the mine that gave life to the settlement.

Gigantic, on a par with the fantastic relocation of the Abu Simbel temples, this solution has the particularity, compared to this classic example, of involving an inhabitant community that participates in the definition and value of the built heritage in question. Along with the practical problems it raises, including those of recognition and legal status of heritage, displacement thus imposes a new conceptualization of heritage and its role in society and in the territory: how, for example, to characterize and preserve the vernacular buildings of displaced living environments? In what form(s) is their identity expressed, according to what relationship to the site and in what way(s) can it, like memory, be transmitted beyond displacement? 

Around the three themes of heritage, identity and memory, this seminar aims to explore situations of "heritage displacement" in order to share policies and practices of evaluation, participation, collection or relocation, not only of villages, but also of cultural landscapes. Can we think that the rising waters also become, in certain communities, an opportunity to make heritage, more than a preserved object, a collective project to be pursued?